Inside the Asylum

My personal favorite: the neutered dog

I like both these slogans: spread my work ethic, not my wealth, and the baby with "I didn't read the bill either"

Of course this is a movement of the extreme right wing white racists

Mr Cooper of the LA Times doesn't know what these people have to protest about. He thinks they're crazy ...

What better way to sum up the entitlement generation?!

This guy was a one-man counter-protest, sort of. Actually, I think he has a very good question. Bush was a big spending Republican. A lot more people should have been speaking out then too.

Here is an example of Mr Cooper's paid protestors out doing the bidding of Fox News. Or maybe it's just a normal person who is fed up with the piles of crap being shoveled in the media?

Not many people turned up to these protests after all...

There have been numerous attempts to distort the attendance at today's Tea Party protests. Let's be frank: all of these have been deliberate attempts to lie about how many people showed up. Let's take a few examples: CNN says it was "tens of thousands". MSNBC "tens of thousands". Yahoo! news? What do you know! "tens of thousands". The Sydney Morning Herald does even better. Let's take some samples

small crowds gathered...the scattered, mostly Republican forces...in Washington, up to 1,000 people...On New York's Staten Island, about 100 people...Several dozen people in Boston...

I won't bother linking to the many and varied websites that shows photos of several thousand people at many different locations. They are too easy to find. Unless you're called Sebastian Smith and work for the Sydney Morning Herald that is. Remarkably, as of 5pm California time, BBC News doesn't mention the protest movement at all. Even after you click through to the "Americas" subsection of the news, there is still no mention. I saw a cup of something black being poured in this story and clicked on it assuming that it must be the story, but that was about the Peruvian coffee crop! You also read about how a US soldier is guilty of murder in Iraq, and also that "Far right groups 'growing' in US" ... but Tea Party? What Tea Party? Oh, I take it back, 5 minutes ago this story was posted. It's a rambling personal narrative of a reporter who attended the DC protest. Remarkably, you have to read down to the 8th paragraph before he even gets around to mentioning the protests! When he does, this is how he begins

The protests are being called "tea parties" after the Boston Tea Party of 1773 - when American colonists rebelled against attempts by Britain to impose parliamentary taxes on them without allowing the colonists to be represented in the British parliament.

The modern versions do not quite have that regime-shaking intensity about them.

Enthusiastic stuff, eh? There's no mention of numbers.

Now, let's do a more accurate and honest estimate of the numbers shall we? I'm also going to spell out exactly how I arrive at my figures. First basis: establish how many different protests there were around the US on April 15th. For this, I'm going to trust an external source, the Wall Street Journal that says there are "300 locations in all 50 states". Let's first test the estimate of "tens of thousands" against that. For want of a better calculation, we'll say that there must have been fewer than 90,000 protesters across all 300 locations. More than 90,000 and you'd be obliged to say "almost 100,000 people" or even "more than 100,000". 90,000 divided by 300 equals 300. So, in order for the "tens of thousands" to be true, there must have been an average of 300 people (or less) at the Tea Party protests. The protest I attended in Santa Ana had at least 1,000 people, even at the most conservative estimate. I'd put it closer to 1,500 people, but we'll go with the thousand for now. If that protest was even slightly typical, we're talking about 300,000 people across the country. That is a massive turnout. Let's split the difference shall we? Even allowing for the fact that I've seen photos of protests in Nashville, in Madison, Indianapolis which clearly had well over a thousand (possibly several thousand), and further reports from Lansing, Columbia South Carolina, Sacramento, etc, all of which claim several thousand. Let's all take this as somewhat exaggerated, and make an extremely conservative estimate of crowd numbers. 650 is the difference between the MSM's claims and the bare minumum estimate of 1000 people who attended all of the protesters from which I have heard number estimates that do not come from the MSM. 650 times 300 protests gives us 195,000 people. I'll be the first to admit that my calculations are hardly going to result in a reliable total ... but I'd be prepared to put money on the fact that my guess of 195,000 across the USA is much closer than that MSM's claims of fewer than 90,000.

Now let's turn to the really interesting bit. It turns out that 300 protests is also a very conservative estimate. The New York Times is hardly a place you'd look for favorable reporting about the Tea Party movement, and it provides this figure: "more than 750 rallies". ABC News agrees it is 750. Let's re-do our calculations shall we, relying upon the New York Times. 90,000 divided by 750 gives us a figure of 120 people. On the other hand, going with my conservative 650 people per protest (which could hardly be claimed to be much of a turn out), we get ... wait for it ... a total of ... no less than ... roughly ... around ... 487,500 people! There's no other way to round that out than to say half a million people turned out for anti-tax protests across the US. Let's continue to dig. The same NY Times story has a few estimates of numbers at different protests:

In Philadelphia a rally drew about 200 rain-soaked participants... Several hundred people showed up in Lafayette Park across from the White House... In Hartford, Conn... an estimated crowd of 3,000 gathered... And in Boston... the size of the crowd, initially about 500, grew as the day progressed...

A hostile blog in the NY Times says "Tax Revolts: Some Succeed, Most Don’t". I'd say that's a pretty fair comment, if the NY Times sample is representative: 200 at one, 300 at another, and 3000 at a third. Let's assume for the moment that this pattern was repeated over the entire country. From 750 protests, we would have 250 with 200 people, 250 with 300 people, and 250 with 3000 people. That seems to be a fair average: two thirds of all protests with very small turn-outs, but one third getting a moderate number to show up. We get 50,000 people at 200 person protests, 75,000 people at 300 person protests, and 750,000 people at 3,000 person protests! So, now we're up to 875,000 people at Tea Bag protests! Let's assume the normal rounding techniques of the media and call it "nearly a million protesters". A real million man march, unlike the one with the name that actually only got 400,000 people to show up.

[Update] Pajamas Media offers a credible number supported by, you know, actual evidence. Of course, we can't trust them, because they're not part of the left wing media. The figure? 551,000 people. So, interestingly enough, it turns out that my own guess of about 200,000 was way too conservative, and that my first "game" of playing with the numbers actually turned up a result fairly close to the truth. Well, what do you know!